What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

So a few weeks ago I posted about how I decided not to play Once Human once I found out you cannot rebind the interact action. I have since revisited that proclamation and wrote an AutoHotkey script that rebinds E to F and F to E while playing the game. AutoHotkey scripts are risky in online games since anticheats like to false-positive flag them as botting software, but so far it's been fine.

If there's one thing I really don't like about the game so far though is that the game provides absolutely zero on-hit feedback (i.e. some kind of screen effect or animation that you're taking damage). I've had several deaths so far, and every single one of them without exception was because I just do not notice I'm taking damage at all. Sometimes because enemies are attacking me I'm not even aware of, but most of the time it's just being hit by bullets (which also doesn't have any kind of visual effect) or being affected by damage-over-time effects (which I think may have a tiny icon on the UI, but you're equally as unlikely to notice that icon as your healthbar going down). Anytime I'm in combat I basically just have to stare constantly at my healthbar, which is very annoying.

Other than that the gunplay and general exploration is pretty enjoyable. Unfortunately, most of the EU servers (as far as I'm aware) are completely dominated by Russians who exclusively use cyrillic, so there's absolutely no social aspect at the moment. For this reason, common advice for EU players seems to be to actually play on NA servers, but I'd be worried about the ping in that case.

I'm not very far into it yet, so I don't know what the endgame experience is like. If anyone has any experience with this game, I'd love to hear it.

I have finished Until Then. The one random tildist who reads these comments might remember that I played this game back in the early summer, but the catch is that you need to relive the events of the game more than once. Since the first ending hits you like a punch to the gut followed by a knee to the groin and a few kicks to the head for good measure, I decided at the time (and in retrospect it was a good decision) to take some time away from it before continuing.

Much like everything else about this game, the repetition was done quite well. There are major unavoidable plot beats, but you start seeing differences almost immediately and those differences become more and more drastic as the mysteries behind the plot are uncovered, leading you toward the beautiful but bittersweet ending that's more typical (in my experience) of eastern-produced games. In any event, this was time well spent, and I recommend the game (read my older comment for first impressions).

I have reached room 46 in Blue Prince! I'm still playing that, since it's a big game. Look like @arghdos got to where we are at a similar playtime though so we're probably keeping a reasonable pace ourselves ;)

Currently at 34 hours and the fears I expressed in the past did not materialize. Most of our runs are still productive and interesting, with meta-progress being steadily made. There is now a ridiculous amount of screenshots in our discord channel for the game, and we're also keeping an information-packed google spreadsheet for collaboration. We still have a number of clear goals we're working towards; we have yet to feel stuck. Much like the relatively recent ANIMAL WELL, this is a problem-solving game with a lot of charisma and style, packed with content, and with several layers of depth. I love that games like this, that cater to tastes like mine, are just coming out regularly now!

Previous

I played just a few hours of the Arc Raiders Server Slam this weekend and even with all the limitations this build of the game had, I'm pretty optimistic for the full release in 10 days. The game looks great and runs smoothly (on my machine at least, seems like some folks with AMD GPUs were experiencing slightly more performance issues), the sound effects are fantastic and atmospheric, the PVE robots are everything from mildly dangerous and annoying to absolutely terrifying, the third person perspective works well even in PVP and indoors, the looting and UI in general is considerably less clunky than other extraction shooters, especially Tarkov's, and while you still do lose all your loot if you're knocked out (except for what's in your safe pocket), it's quick and easy to either craft some essentials back or just grab a free loadout and immediately jump into a fresh match.

This game takes some big steps towards being the most accessible extraction shooter on the market, namely:

• No progress wipes except for an optional prestige
• A chicken at your safehouse that retrieves crafting materials over time, and can be upgraded to retrieve more
• A skill tree for meta-progression, so you don't start from zero if you get knocked out
• A free loadout option with no catch or cooldown, so you can always play with nothing to lose
• A generous crafting system that allows you to get some decent gear made just from gathering common materials in the (relatively) low-risk zones
• A skill that lets you craft some items even in the field, which can come in extremely clutch if you run out of bandages or shield rechargers
• The ability to activate the exit elevator even while you're downed and crawling around
• An abundance of loot, which makes it easier to rat for a decent profit, and gives players less incentive to kill other players on sight if they're already full up
• Genuinely threatening PVE enemies with good loot which encourage players to play smarter and stealthier, or team up
• Proximity chat and in-game emotes that can be heard nearby, in case you want to signal to other groups that you're not hostile (or shit talk them, but it is a competitive game after all so that's kind of expected)

I'm holding off on pre-ordering the game out of principle, but if I can get some friends interested I'll definitely pick it up with them. The game is definitely playable solo or queued with randoms, I was only queuing with randoms during this server slam, but it really shines when you're actually communicating, sharing loot, and working together.

Honorary mention to Egg Inc., which is a mobile idle game I've been "playing" for years, as much as you can consider mobile idle gameplay to be playing. I've been pretty comfortably at endgame for a while now but they dropped a major update a bit over a month ago that added a new game mode tailored for endgame players, and it's actually got me actively playing it again rather than just doing my idle routine. If you want a mobile idle game to play, I can recommend this one.

I was looking for something appropriate to the season, so I decided to start playing Costume Quest on my Steam Deck. I've owned this game for probably over 10-years now and continually started it around this time and never made it past the first area before dropping it. But something about playing it on the Deck is just the right fit, I have no idea why I never tried before.

Anyway, I don't have any new thoughts on this old game, other than the fact that it feels absolutely great to play around this time of year and its Halloween vibes are off the charts. The combat is so-so, but goes by quick enough that it's not too bad--though I do wish you could skip some of the cutscenes in it--and you're basically doing the same thing in each area, a concession of being an early, cheap indie game, but the vibes are good and seeing what each new costume does is pretty cool. I'm hoping to finish this one this time and then maybe I'll move on to Costume Quest 2 in the future...